KEYNOTE SPEAKER: LUIS PÉREZ-GONZÁLEZ, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AUDIOVISUAL TRANSLATION IN THE POSTMODERN AESTHETICS OF DIGITAL CULTURE:
A MULTIMODAL-THEORY ACCOUNT OF DANMU
Abstract
The shift from the dominant narrational regime of Western modernity to postmodern aesthetics in digital culture – facilitated by the transition from ‘recording’ to ‘synthesising technologies’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) – has had important implications for audiovisual texts and their translation. As the ‘ontologies of referentiality’ associated with the hegemonic narrational regime have given way to the ‘ontology of deconstruction’ that lies at the heart of the digital media ecology, ordinary people have developed new and experimental subtitling practices that expose the multimodal circuitry of audiovisual texts – creating collective spaces of translatorship for the negotiation of mundane or ethical identities. While some of types of ‘prosumption’ enabled by synthesising technologies – in particular, fansubbing and activist subtitling (Pérez-González 2012, 2014) – are now well documented in the literature, new performative subtitling practices ushered in by recent technological developments remain relatively underexplored.
My presentation draws on the notion of ‘semiotic software’ (Djonov and van Leeuwen 2017) to explore the multimodal configuration of the Chinese participatory culture known as danmu. Associated with a form of Asian aesthetic that favours user-driven experiences, danmu illustrates the extent to which semiotic software – a semiotic artefact in its own right – is influencing the practices through which viewers choose to engage with texts and with fellow viewers, and bringing about the ultimate emancipation of on-screen text from the primordial narratives that subtitles were once conceived to mediate. Against this backdrop, I examine how the production a potential contagion of the danmu subculture outside China may affect the production of audiovisual narratives, and the contribution that this subculture can make to the internationalisation of disciplinary discourses on translation.
About the Speaker
Luis Pérez-González is Professor of Translation Studies and Co-director of the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He is co-editor of the Routledge series Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media; author of Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues (Routledge 2014); editor of The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation (2018); and Academic Director of the International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2019).